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" When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets. "

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" When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to. "

Thom Gunn

Sent

First

Been

" I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects. "

" We control the content of our dreams. "

" I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about. "

" I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using. "

Thom Gunn

Myself

Poem

" Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady. "

" I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other. "

" I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way. "

" My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand. "

" There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply. "

" I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home. "

" I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop. "

" It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change! "

" I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse. "

" We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading. "

" I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader. "

" I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up. "

Thom Gunn

Years

Written

" I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex. "

" When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew. "

" We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy. "

" I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early. "

Thom Gunn

Growing Old

Friends

" Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help. "

" As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery. "

" Many of my poems are not sexual. "